Allways take the words of reviewers or marketing/sales people with a pinch of salt.
They only sell you dreams, that is their job.
Johnny Darko seems to be a nice guy but he also has to make a living.
Subjective frustration expressed quite aggressively = truth?
Sure, I mean we have seen that behaviour a lot lately. Must be true then…
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While that seems unlikely, OK, let us do 100K users at 10 USD a month. That is 12M a year. Let us guess that Roon spends 60% of its revenue on salaries (which is excessive). That is 7.2M a year, less taxes, less benefits, I would guess at least a third of that goes down the drain, probably a lot more, so 4.8M a year. With a median salary of 100K a year (including management) that means 48 people. Half of those business, sales, marketing, accounting, B2B relations, management, half is technical. Out of technical half to a 2/3 will do project management, backend dev, database, 3rd party and hardware related, testing etc., so we are left with 8-12 people doing coding for front end on multiple platforms, including UI and UX…
What I said was “the statement may be true”. In this case statement = Massive Failure.
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The explanation is simple. My system is my hobby, I listen to an average of 10 hours of music a day. This system is networked in the house, has grown over decades and has the equivalent of an exotic sports car. Every component has been chosen with care, and I have saved several years for some parts. Listening is almost exclusively via streamers and as it should be for such a system, it is of course controlled by the best of all control programs. Roon. And now this previously flawless program is mutating into an ugly and confusing construction site. There is not only disappointment spreading, but also anger that you are being patronized in a way that I would not have imagined. I express this anger and frustration in this forum. Hoping the Roon crew will understand what they did to me with this version. Indeed, I feel patronized and personally attacked. It’s not very helpful when fanboys praise the new version with a loud “Hallelujah”. But of course I give everyone their joy. But then I should also be given the choice to stick to my previous version. An option Roon did not envisage in any way. For me the whole thing is a really big trouble.
That’s why …
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If you read my post, you will see I was referring to the concept of letting people vote on what features Roon should implement. I said nothing about the need for more extensive beta testing.
Does Apple implement features based on customer votes?
I agree. Design by committee rarely works out well. Better to have a single-minded focused point of view in a design. Some will love it, some not bit better than an incoherent mishmash.
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The settings are back, but my cocktail device is missing again. This morning it was back, 2 hours later missing again. Only airplay displayed. Works fine with 1.7.
I use Roon on my smartphone and I am not happy at all. Ghe nue UI is a disaster. 1.7 was the benchmark for the whole industry. Now it’s on par with the rest. Suddenly, Qobuz does not look so bad anymore.
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I am honestly interested to learn why you think it to be amazing compared to 1.7? For my use-case (only classical music, local files only, approx. 10.000 albums 227K tracks, fully tagged) I do see some changes that you could consider improvements but no big difference.
My biggest pain point beyond anything else (independent of Roon version so far):
I have my files tagged in a consistent manner according to Roon’s File Tag Best Practices.
If I let Roon do its magic without interfering, I get inconsistent metadata across all my albums added (and changed) to my well-curated collection. Why should I live with that? It makes no sense for me to open metadata tickets for wrong metadata from 3rd party, while my file tags are correct.
Alternatively, I can change the settings and set all possibilitries to “prefer file” and Roon still interferes in my primary artists (I do have the primary artists tagged in the way I want, but Roon adds stuff to them). It also interferes with my composition tags and at the same takes away the added value of composition descriptions…
My conclusion is that I’m in two ways not the target audience: as someone with a large file library and as someone who has curated it.
I need to do additional work to what I have already done in order to have my library in Roon the way I tagged it following Roon’s Best Practice. What else could I do?
Sorry for the rant - it’s not meant against you. But I hear these comments on how much better 1.8 for classical is and I don’t get it. Somebody help me…
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As Michael Jackson sang (tune in my head now): You are not alone!
I do understand when people would write that it is so much better for Jazz now - I followed that route with 1.8 and it is fun.
But for classical?? I also have no idea what is better aboit it now.
I personally would be so over the moon happy, if a simple search of a Work/album title plus artist actually would show all the albums with said artists in my collection. But it does not - This sort of thing works in the most primitive databases, but not in Roon. I really thought they would have fixed this (as promissed) but they have not.
I still stick with Roon even have 2 subs - so can have a litte rant for 2 
But this 1.8 is not my dream come true… (putting it very nicely)
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Why the negative energy? I really spend a fortune on my hobby and I have selected every component carefully to fullfil my requirements. Some of them are specific for an optimized listening experience using roon as my music managment system. Because roon has been consistent over years, I had further invested into this ecosystem. Now, from one day to another, this investment is in question for me.
Roon has been the industry benchmark for audio management for several years. Every other product, including popular streaming services (such as the roon integrated services Tidal and/or Qobuz), was rated against roon. None of them could match roons visual beauty and metadata richness. So what did roon do? They put the UI 3 steps backwards and is now on par with Qobuz. Isn’t that great? I really need to ask: Guys, did you hire the UI designers of Qobuz?
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You really think so? I’m currently reorganising tracks on a poorly identified set, 61 tracks in 8 CDs, and I’m still moving tracks around one by one using idiotic arrows.
I also have a recent album with no compositions identified, and for the life of me I can’t figure out how to assign them manually and make sure they appear alongside other renderings. It took some work, but heck, I had managed to get my compositions working on iTunes faster than this.
I know there are some improvements for classical music, but I feel we’re still very, very far from something that works well, especially when it comes to massaging poor initial data.
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Actually that was my first thought - it really looks like Qobuz - the artist bubbles and all.
Not loving the grey circles in the credits at all.
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I fully agree with your reasoning.
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Aah, the subjectivist subscription and financial analyst rolled into one shining a light where no other could 
I agree that the way that credits are displayed is ridiculous. On any album with a bunch of contributors the credits are pretty much not usable. We do not need to see the photo icons of contributors unless we click on them. The previous method of displaying credits was much better.
In my system, with Roon Core on a Windows 10 computer and using Apple computers and iPad/iPhones for clients, the new Roon OS has been stable. I can live with the software as it is for the time being. I am glad that I have not paid for a lifetime license.
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Sounds exactly like me, actually. But I’m not seeing why this is the end of the world. The end of the road. So 1.8 comes along and some act as if that’s the last version that is ever going to be made? Don’t expect perfection. Strive for it. And make people (Roon in this case) motivated to work towards it.
Anger at being patronized how exactly? By the update itself? By Roon support here at the forum?
(And am I now considered to be a fanboy for having another opinion on 1.8? I’m not saying it’s perfect, probably far from. But in my world, nothing ever is and should constantly be evolved to some extent. That’s very much true especially when it comes to software)
Roon has been quite consistent, and for the past few years felt quite dated in my opinion. So if not changing is consistent then yes. There are definitely things that need to be bettered, but that’s always the fact when making bigger changes.
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I don’t oppose anyone’s right to be angry or frustrated here. But if you really want people (Roon in this case) to listen then lower the tone and try to report things in a more rational matter.
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Jesus - all this negativity is really annoying. Personally - no issues at all and really enjoying it.
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FWIW the slowness I noticed was primarily just navigating through albums / artists. This was done on an iMac Pro w/ the core installed on the same, so no network to consider for that case. It was all local traffic.
Its very possible that Room, at least pre 1.8, was just much faster on windows platforms…that wouldn’t be too surprising given its written in some cross-platform library on top of C#.